Symbolica
The Third Eye on The Opening of the Third Eye, the rest of the plate faded

The Third Eye on The Opening of the Third Eye. Tap the picture to open it.

powers

The Third Eye

the pineal gland, the pineal body, the eye single, the sacred eye of the ancients

An eye that is not on the face. One painter put it in the middle of a skull, and the man who commissioned him named the gland.

Look at the head on this plate: the bone is drawn as though it were glass. Serailian painted Minerva in profile in a winged helmet with the brain and the glands showing through in blue, red and yellow, and a beam of light crossing from the glands to the brow. Hall's printed caption says what the picture is of: “This painting of the head of Minerva shows, in part, the activities of the pineal gland and the pituitary body at the time of the phenomenon commonly termed the opening of the Third Eye.”

So on the one plate here that draws it, the third eye is an organ. Hall gives it a location and an ancestry in a single sentence: “In the human brain there is a tiny gland called the pineal body, which is the sacred eye of the ancients, and corresponds to the third eye of the Cyclops.” A gland, and two claims about it, both of them anatomical rather than figurative.

Then he presses harder, and this sentence is worth having whole. “As its name signifies, the pineal gland is the sacred pine cone in man - the eye single, which cannot be opened until CHiram (the Spirit Fire) is raised through the sacred seals which are called the Seven Churches in Asia.” Pine cone, from the Latin for the shape of the gland. The eye single, from scripture. CHiram, from the masonic legend Hall is in the middle of telling. Seven seals up the body, from the Apocalypse. Four traditions are wired together inside one clause, by a writer of the twentieth century, and the painting is made to his order.

Which is the thing to keep hold of when the phrase turns up elsewhere, because the other eyes in this archive are not this eye. Cross's All-Seeing Eye looks out of a cloud and reads a man's heart from outside him. The eye above the Great Seal's pyramid is thanking providence. The Gemma manuscript sets one between two circles under the roots of a tree, watching. Those belong to somebody else and are pointed at you. Hall's is yours, and he tells you which gland it is.

Contested

Hall is the only voice here. He wrote in 1928, he is writing about the pineal gland rather than quoting an older text that identifies it, and the Cyclops, the pine cone, the eye single and the Seven Churches are his connections rather than connections the archive can show being made earlier. The plate is a painting made to illustrate him, not a document he found. No older picture in this collection draws an eye inside a head.

Sources

  1. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928: The printed plate caption, read by eye from the photographed page, and the passages on the pineal gland in the chapter on the Hiramic legend.

On the same plate

Where it appears · 1

1 work in the archive carries the Third Eye. First the one where it has been read, with the Third Eye itself picked out.